A UK study designed to answer the question: ‘What would be the impacts of the introduction of a deposit refund system for oneway beverage packaging on local authority waste services in England?’ shows councils would benefit from the introduction of a deposit return scheme (DRS). It finds that, while it

The New Zealand Product Stewardship Council (NZPSC) supports the recent call by the eDay Trust to introduce an e-waste product stewardship scheme for New Zealand. “Electronic waste has been a growing problem for New Zealand, and unlike most western countries, we have basically ignored it” says Sandra Murray, co-ordinator for

G20 Action Plan on Marine Litter recommends the introduction of EPR (we call it product stewardship in NZ) and Bottle Deposits! Last month, the Group of Twenty – or G20 as it is popularly known – met in Hamburg, Germany to agree on an action plan to tackle the growing

The opening of Flight Plastics PET recycling facility in Lower Hutt is a good step towards development of NZ based recycling processing. The capacity to turn over 200 million plastic drink bottles a year into high grade food-safe packaging will enable NZ to move away from exporting our waste to other

Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of reusable and recyclable materials are going to landfill each year in NZ because waste disposal is the cheapest option. This includes electronic waste, plastic film, beverage containers and construction waste. A new report by Eunomia has proposed raising NZ’s landfill levy from the current

After rejecting an industry-designed workable product stewardship scheme for end of life tyres, Environment Minister Nick Smith announced today the government would allocate $19 million taxpayer dollars into a false solution instead – most of the funding to go to Chinese-owned company, Waste Management NZ, to collect and shred scrap

Reverse vending is where a bottle or can is placed into a vending machine and a coin, token or redemption voucher is offered in return. Reverse vending machines are often used in international container deposit schemes and certainly have a place in a well-designed container deposit scheme (CDS). They enable

Environment Minister Nick Smith recently announced public funding for yet another packaging-waste scheme (the ‘Do the Right Thing’ initiative), so it is timely that we cast our eyes back over the history of litter. View this article by the NZPSC on how littering has been used by the packaging industry

In what will be widely seen as a massive U-turn, the soft-drinks giant Coca-Cola has thrown its support behind calls for the Scottish Government to introduce a deposit return scheme, in an effort to reduce littering and boost recycling. Deposit return schemes (DRS), in which consumers pay a small sum